Privacy-Web3 market-fit: search of privacy sustainability
More than 200 startups build Web3 privacy solutions now. They have a different approach to privacy but a common goal: “the next 1B people in Web3”.
It’s a challenging journey, especially when Web3 services need more friendly UX/UI and simplified onboarding into the industry. This article summarises challenges & solutions on the way to a Privacy-Web3 Market-Fit.
Let’s start with a riddle: the web3 startup wants to be successful but sustainable. So what people should it tackle: web2 that lacks knowledge about crypto & Web3 stack or communicate with the Web3-natives first? In times when the general public gives scalability & Web3 potential ambassadors with less educational effort.
Recently Secret Network hosted its summit. The first question Guy Zyskind (Secret Network, Founder) asked was, “if people care about privacy?” & it polarised experts: Joe Andrews from Aztec said that people don’t care & Josh Swihart (Electric Coin Co., SVP) backlashed with a call to change our vocabulary by making privacy a norm. So it was the different starting point to privacy: ignorance-centric & empowering (somehow, it reminds me of Solarpunks & Lunarpunks differentiations).
This triggered me to expand a narrow view of privacy-as-a-life choice & oppose privacy-as-a-value. Nowadays, the Web3 market needs more privacy-centric educational materials to help even privacy-startup executives speak the same language. Because people care about privacy a lot, it’s just that they could use “security” or “protection” instead of “privacy”. But each use case would be facilitated under the general “privacy umbrella”.
Here’s how privacy solutions could be facilitated within the different use cases (highly influenced by the context):
Political — privacy solutions that cover fundamental democratic values like freedom of speech or human life. At the same time, they oppose government censorship in countries like China or Russia.
Economical — privacy solutions that deal with the necessity for financial anonymity. They cover the right of agency over personal financials but simultaneously protect from hackers, phishing or surveillance capitalism (when your data is the product).
Ethical — privacy solutions that deal with sensitive social issues like cyberstalking and professional ethics (fake/actual diploma; Satoshi Nakamoto case).
It’s crucial to structure privacy implications so they won’t fall into the Web3 paranoia around “feds are coming for us” or get stuck just with the financial use case (token-centric). Both professional & casual approaches to privacy start with a helicopter view of privacy implications. It will lead to developers building more versatile solutions, people to onboard privacy more easily (or spending more effort), and Web3 leaders raising the bar of privacy vision.
More use cases for each privacy track
Political
- Ukraine: at the same time, Ukrainian people living under Russian occupation need encrypted messaging and hidden IP addresses to secure their lives.
- Catalonia: highly political pro-independence Catalan Jordi Baylina knows that privacy means preservation of the local voting (think of referendum) while protecting from the Spanish government consequences.
- China: VPN could help to have a glimpse of the global picture beyond the Great Firewall of China
Economical
- Ukraine: yes, culturally, people use crypto to avoid taxes. Here privacy means economical self-sovereignty without government regulations.
- Cybercrimes on the rise: hackers and online thieves steal billions every year; CEXs, DeFi protocols & bridges are highly exploited in crypto, so enhancing anti-fraud protection should be one of the critical priorities of the Web3 market (from “not your keys, not your coins” to re-designed email-clients)
- Cambridge Analytica case: shows that advertising targeting could lead to election highjacking; while Coca-Cola with Google use the same technics to pursue you spend more precious time with informational pollution (ads) & buy products you don’t need (consumerism)
Note: surveillance capitalism in this category means redistribution of money from your wallet to corporations that use the whole MarTech stack to aggregate, analyse & monetise your data. Private solutions could save you money (cut corporates from existing business models), but at the same time, lead to a healthier lifestyle (out of the so-called “attention economy”).
Ethical
- Cyberstalking: it’s on the rise & one of the dirtiest use-case for privacy exploitation. It happens every day whether you are a woman or a minority. Here privacy solutions could protect DAOs thematically from bad actors’ infiltration; design a non-harmful but private access layer (re-designed anonymous credentials).
- Satoshi Nakamoto: it’s a killer use-case to prove that privacy with an identity relation could save your life but simultaneously catalyse innovation. Here anonymous credentials would change the way privacy is facilitated within the workplaces, how your expert level is proven & your identity is amplified. Especially without becoming a proxy-Chinese surveillance of Uighurs (read: social scoring + data aggregation + online/offline matching + AI).
WEB3 PRIVACY DILEMMA
The “privacy paradox” is the discord between our online activities and attitudes about privacy. It was coined in 2001 by HP researchers analysing human behaviour online.
They found out that people care about privacy but execute it exceptionally poorly. That’s what’s happening in the Web3 market now! Many speeches about “privacy as a human right”, but fewer talks about its implementation.
I have two assumptions:
- Tech people facilitate the majority of privacy solutions in Web3: they have many professional biases from “I build a wonderful tech — everyone would use it” to “decentralisation is the future — everyone should care about it now”. Moreover, they don’t perceive humans from marketing or product managers’ viewpoints (from awareness to trial).
- The market is in an echo chamber: privacy talks lack privacy experts from the Web2 (from surveillance capitalism experts to institutions like AccessNow), privacy use cases circle around DeFi, and privacy 101 usually ends with a generic “why” & not “how” (or “how” could be a highly-abstract ZK-solution for cryptographers)
It’s essential to step out of the echo chamber now and think more broadly about what kind of role the Web3 industry wants to play when everyone from Apple to Meta preaches about privacy.
PRIVACY EVOLUTION: FROM WEB2 TO WEB3
Empathy helps people model human behaviour. It’s a critical skill for marketing or product managers. Because they work with people and analyse their lives, emotions and context related to tech products experience. That’s why diving deeper into the complex human decision-making process is vital to make Web3 privacy flourish. Especially when “the next 1B people in the Web3” is on the horizon (or within the “black hole” in Interstellar).
Fact: the majority of non-web3 people don’t use progressive privacy solutions. Their basic levels are Apple devices protection + end-to-end encryption within selected messaging platforms.
Here’s WhatsApp’s landing page — they “sell” privacy (also note the role of privacy in the main menu).
Moreover, Meta is selling privacy as their top priority, being an ultimate beneficiary of surveillance capitalism.
Note that privacy isn’t a strictly Web3 topic but a colossal industry facilitated by the biggest corporations in the world. Here privacy helps them to create enclosed systems to lock humans within their devices or services. Privacy is a metaphor for care that shifts the narration from a data-driven business model to an emotional bond between services (WhatsApp) & humans.
Open question: what role would you play being a web3 privacy expert within a privacy-overloaded comms full of Meta-alike voices?
Let’s return to our precious humans:
- They are “empowered” by WhatsApp type of “privacy”.
- They need to be literate in privacy self-protection & need to pass the whole long way from privacy 101 to professional privacy execution.
Think of this as a marketing funnel, AIDA, “consumer journey” or other practical tools that map a human journey from zero to hero.
It’s important to know that every journey is unique (because people are unique), and tools simplify generalised views on human behaviour. So there will always be exceptions: a group of women in Iran could switch to Signal overnight, being afraid of their lives, or a web3 newcomer could de-install MetaMask & search for an alternative after the recent ConsenSys privacy policy scandal.
KNOW YOUR PRIVACY AUDIENCE
It would be naive to think that a non-web3 audience could use the most sophisticated privacy tech stack from the get-go. Instead, most people would start with something practical & straightforward that requires less time on onboarding (less complex, less technical, human-friendly UX/UI).
Case study: VPN became one of the most popular free software in Google Play once the Ukrainian government banned pro-Russian social media.
Value: people were discovering the VPN category, so they could reach their friends or the “whole life” they used to live on those social media (even being surveilled by the Russian gov).
Partner: media played a pivotal role in VPN adoption — sharing instructions & guides on how to find cheap/free VPN, install & use it with ease
Note how privacy stack could vary within
- Habits — multiple emails are a habit
- Tools — “run your own node” is a tool
Habits could be related to privacy rituals or a lifestyle. As for the tools, they are highly impacted by the front-end (usability) & tech knowledge requirements.
Open question: should privacy newcomers start with a web2 privacy solution & then switch to web3 or start with the web3 immediately?
NON-TECHIES VS TECHIES
UX/UI is a common reason people use traditional surveillance capitalism instruments. Corporations think within an “economies of scale” mindset that requires building products suitable for everyone from Thailand to Morocco. So naturally, this leads to the creation of the most simplified solutions you could think of. As a result, for example, thousands and thousands of Catalan grandmas are using WhatsApp daily — that’s a fact!
Moreover, notice how social studies became an integral part of the data-driven marketing approach. For example, Google encourages advertisers to work with human psychological biases. Why? All consumer decision-making happens in your brain (which we usually underestimate).
Making privacy-solutions human friendly is one of the biggest challenges for the web3 industry.
HOW GENERAL PUBLIC MAKES DECISIONS
Let’s imagine you want to take responsibility for the privacy advocacy of the general public. A privacy-illiterate person needs to pass different stages before product usage. I simplify this process into
- raising awareness about privacy necessity (media, conferences, 101, guides, podcasts, knowledge bases, comms campaigns)
- empowering consideration when a person thinks about starting to use privacy tools
- again empowering practical need and evaluation process (content tailored within the different needs & personas, comparison tables)
- supporting trial or purchase experience (poor usage could lead to product de-installation)
All this would happen in the world where Apple will “sell” privacy, and the new Avatar movie would distract privacy-solutions comparison, the World Cup final celebration erase trigger that almost led to purchase/trial.
Examine how Brave marketing team motivate people to switch from surveillance to private browsers. Calculate how much time a person need to spend to understand all positive benefits from both privacy & product: link
COMPLEX PRIVACY DECISION-MAKING JOURNEY
Whether you like it or not, each phase requires the same complex decision-making process. Because humans are complex, they live in an informationally overloaded world without a stable internet connection or megabytes for online surfing. This requires 4x times more effort for education, privacy-advocacy & support.
Why are all 4 phases essential for the Web3 industry? Because many non-web3 people would start from generic VPNs, Signal & other Web2 privacy-centric services & then switch to more sophisticated tech. Or it could be a mix of both worlds.
TRANSITION CHALLENGES
The more complex & unpredictable humans you think of — the better for the so-called web3 privacy adoption. Transitioning from one state of privacy to another is a roller coaster (Google marketers call it “the messy middle” and sell advertisers to deal with consumer biases). In our case, adoption challenges could vary:
- the emotional state of the person (from conscious anti-surveillance capitalists to “feds paranoia types”)
- self-education about privacy (no privacy-centric resources around)
- practical necessities
- broader life context (comfortable middle-class consumerist lifestyle).
And yeah, most UX professionals would state that people are lazy!
WELL-BALANCED APPROACH
I propose a balanced approach to Web3 privacy advocacy:
empower non-web3 audiences with Privacy 101 & ease to use solutions but make Web3-natives advocates of advanced privacy protection beyond financial use cases.
One practical use case to highlight necessary changes in privacy advocacy: Orchid is a VPN protocol that “delivers digital privacy”.
Now let’s imagine that we are a non-web3 person visiting the “How it works” section. How do you think we would feel reading “deventralized virtual private network”, “ERC-20 staking token”, “token-incentivised bandwidth proxying”, “smart-contracts with algorithmic advertising”, “Ethereum transaction fees”? One word: confusion.
Here I want to draw attention to the enormous educational challenge for web3 privacy advocates. It requires privacy 101, web3 101 & only then — how web3 could empower privacy protection.
This means taking responsibility for the whole educational “stack“ for the general public:
- Be privacy literate (basic level)
- Understand decentralisation ideology
- Understand disruptive token-centric business models
- Understand web3 stack (generic level beyond privacy)
- Understand the difference between web2 & web3 privacy
- Understand how to evaluate web3 privacy solutions & so on.
Open question: why a person needs to stake non-available tokens on the road to privacy?
Different events from stolen funds to government censorship catalyse privacy literacy. It’s a special moment for you when the general public is open & eager to explore new privacy solutions.
Imagine as many privacy-catalyst moments as possible & your role in empowering the general public.
Web3 leaders are playing a crucial role in the Privacy-Web3 market fit. They both reach the wider general public via education, tooling & inclusive community, but at the same time grow future privacy advocates who are already into crypto & decentralisation. One day, the Privacy-We3 market fit will be found at the crossroads between the general public interest & Web3 privacy influencers’ empowerment.
SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
I want to finish my take on privacy by highlighting the essential bad actor harnessing privacy now — surveillance capitalism.
Oversimplified explanation: you are the product online — surveilled 24/7, and your data is aggregated & modelled. So you buy more and live consumerist not-conscious life — corporations extract value from both your data & your wallet. This approach harms individuals, communities, environment, & even leads to genocides.
If we want to accomplish privacy vision — we need to make it within an explicit transition from the web2 cannibalistic practices to the Web3-as-a-lifestyle. So I invite readers & leaders to think over a more significant than advocacy approach for privacy protection that could compete with powerful bad actors & their partners.
Open question: is the EU on the web3 side forcing companies to follow GDPR?
Here’s now Web3-privacy ambassadors could find powerful allies from human rights institutions to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to join forces against greater evil threatening privacy.
This would also help to change the web3 industry’s image surrounded by scams, theft and “Ponzi schemes” criticism for the better. Shifting efforts solely from “transaction-centric” use cases to broader implications of privacy & enabling positive partnerships that empower people & not tokens.
Just imagine a collaboration between professors, scientists, cryptographic geographers, entrepreneurs, ravers… That’s how the notion of privacy & approach to its preservation could be expanded to geographical, minority, and cultures empowerment.
Conclusion
Web3 market wants to be sustainable & core of human interactions. Therefore, one of the market’s goals could be reaching Privacy-Web3 market fit — a scenario in which a web3 market’s people are buying, using, and telling others about the web3 products in numbers large enough to sustain that web3 growth.
That includes both the general public & web3-natives. Creating a privacy-advocacy cycle:
- people onboarded into web3-privacy with ease
- web3 solutions co-exist with the best from the web2 privacy
- leaders exchange best practices constantly (Nym CEO Harry Halpin collaborates with Meredith Whittaker or Jarrad Hope’ Logos.co works with Tactical Tech)
- knowledge is accessible to everyone
- new collaborations between designers, developers, academics, marketers, activists, data policy managers are possible
- solutions open-sourced and easily forkable
- and there’s no point in even using web2 vs web3 dichotomies
So privacy becomes a norm (or even a verb), as Josh Swihart wants it to be. With people understanding their digital rights & whole global digital “economy” structure.
Let’s work!
This article is a part of the Web3privacy now research project
